Rodney King’s Daughters: The World Watched As Their Father Was Beaten

Seven-year-old Lora King sat glued to the television on March 4, 1991, staring in horror as four white police officers viciously beat a black man—pummeling him with batons, shooting him with a Taser and kicking his body as he writhed on the ground. At a time before Flip cams and YouTube, the amateur video shot by a bystander looped endlessly on 24-hour news stations. Watching with her family in her mother’s Montclair, California, apartment, the girl remembers feeling pity for this stranger.

Then the newscaster said his name: Rodney King. As in Rodney King, her father. “Until that point we were all making comments: ‘That’s horrible. Poor guy.’ And then we heard his name, and I thought, Wait, what? That’s my dad?” Lora says. Although she hadn’t spent much time with him in the previous months—her parents were estranged—she was still a “super daddy’s girl,” and didn’t understand why cops would be attacking him. While her mother stood in front of the TV wailing, Lora withdrew to the bathroom to cry until her mother found her there later. “You have to think positive,” her mom, now calm, said. But Lora couldn’t stop replaying in her head the sight of her father being beaten.

About 60 miles east of L.A., eight-year-old Candice King, Rodney’s daughter from another relationship, also watched the beating on television. Candice was close to her father as well, even though she saw him infrequently. And she cried as she realized that the man lying broken and bleeding in the street was her father. “I was just a kid, but I still saw what was going on,” she says. “I was confused and sad—it was my dad.”

Just as the little girls struggled to process what they saw on television that day, the rest of the country reeled at the images of raw violence that had invaded their living rooms. And as a result, overnight, the event exposed a huge rift in American society, proving for many that racism was alive and well. And as the backstory unfolded, things got even more complicated: Because Rodney had been on probation for a robbery conviction when police tried to pull him over for driving recklessly, he led them on a high-speed chase through Los Angeles. Once they’d stopped him and taken his two passengers into custody, Rodney got out of the car and, according to police, lunged at them. When one officer’s Taser failed to subdue him, two of the dozen or so officers present struck him with their nightsticks more than 50 times, and yet another officer stomped on him as the others watched. He was left with multiple skull fractures, a broken ankle, bruises and lacerations. The incident might have come and gone with little fanfare, except that a man in a nearby apartment caught most of it on his video camera, and sent the footage to a local news station. CNN picked it up the next day, and it blanketed airwaves across the country.

Rodney’s mother took Lora to see him after the beating. She barely recognized her father, his handsome face swollen and disfigured. “He couldn’t really talk,” Lora says. “I was terrified. I kept asking, ‘Is he going to die?’”

Days later Rodney was released from the hospital without any charges being filed. He went to see Lora, who asked him why he’d been beaten. “He told me sometimes people won’t like you because of your skin color,” Lora remembers. That scared her, and her fear would soon prove valid. Strangers called her school with death threats against the grade-schooler, and her classmates said her dad “had it coming,” for running from the police. “I thought, Nobody deserves that. How can you say he deserved that? And then I thought, Well, dang, did he deserve it?” she says. “I would come home and cry all the time.” Candice was harassed too. “People were crank-calling us and threatening us, so we stayed in the house,” she says. “There were things we wanted to do, but we were afraid.” Outside, their father had become a symbol; the girls even saw his image printed on T-shirts. But for them, the worst was yet to come.

“Can We All Get Along?”

Sitting at an Applebee’s in Fontana, California, an hour east of Los Angeles, the sisters reminisce over lunch. Candice, now 28, is eight months pregnant and living with her mother in Fontana. Lora, 27, makes her home in the Los Angeles suburb of Altadena with her boyfriend and their three-year-old daughter, Jailyn, who sits beside her now, immersed in a coloring book. Rodney lives in Southern California too, but Candice and Lora say they don’t see him much. By the time they were in high school, he was in and out of jail and rehab facilities, and mostly absent from their lives.

Because they were so young, there’s a lot the two women don’t recall about the year after the beating. They remember that the four police officers were on trial (for assault and other charges), and that everyone had an opinion about the case. “Even when my dad wasn’t around, and people didn’t know who I was, he’d come up as a subject,” says Lora. “I would just listen.” Both Candice and Lora got counseling, during which therapists tried to help them make sense of their new identities as “Rodney King’s daughters.” They slouched through the first year of school after the beating. “I was hoping [the officers] would be found guilty and spend the rest of their lives in jail,” Candice says. And that people would finally stop talking about their father.

On April 29, 1992, after a two-month trial, the jury—10 whites, one Latino, one Asian and no blacks—delivered their verdict: Three of the officers were acquitted on all counts; the jury was hung on a charge for the fourth. They all walked out of the courtroom as free men that day.

Within hours of the announcement, there were reports of roving groups smashing windows, looting stores and yelling, “This is for Rodney King!” Enraged mobs marched through the streets, attacking defenseless onlookers. Overwhelmed, the police retreated. During the next five days, L.A. was home to one of the largest urban riots in American history: More than 50 people died and more than 2,000 were injured, thousands of fires were lit and an estimated $1 billion in damage was done. “It was mass chaos, people running all over, fires and smoke everywhere,” Lora says of the destruction she watched just outside her window on Western Avenue. She felt sorry for her father, knowing he’d forever be viewed as the spark that started it all.

Worse, on the third day of the riots, Rodney famously exhorted for TV cameras: “Can we all get along?” He meant that the rioters should stop, presumably, but some in the African American community now labeled him a sellout and a clown. “Everybody asked, ‘Why is he defending [the police]?’” says Lora. Candice recalls white classmates calling her father “a nigger,” and black kids were mocking him too. “There was a lot of racist stuff going on,” she says.

“Everything Fell Apart After the Riots”

To escape the media scrutiny, Rodney’s mother moved six hours away, to Sacramento. She had been the glue that held the family together, Candice says. “Everything fell apart once my grandmother left.” Unable to chart a better course, Candice dropped out of high school and numbed herself with drugs and alcohol, just as Rodney had.

Lora hung on. On top of coping with her father’s infamy, she’d grown up in various rough L.A. neighborhoods and had witnessed shootings and drug deals on her street. But she sought lifelines: an aunt who tutored her, the high school principal who took her to work at soup kitchens. “I started doing little things to help people, and that helped me a lot,” she says. At some point during her senior year, the same year she was elected class president, she noticed that her father had made it into her history book. “It was all there—the riots, how they affected people, how many died,” she says. But by this point, she was unfazed by such reminders.

Lora continues to give back. Her administrative job at an accounting firm keeps her on a tight budget, but every month she and Jailyn bring brown-bag lunches to the homeless on Skid Row. “I have to feed my soul,” she says. Rodney, she notes, doesn’t approve of her philanthropic work. “He says, ‘You can’t save the world. You should just worry about you.’ He has a big heart, but I think this whole thing made him coldhearted.”

Candice, on the other hand, continued her downward spiral throughout her twenties—until she found out she was pregnant. She’s now been clean for eight months, and she plans to tell her daughter about her legacy. “I’m going to sit down and explain to her our family history—she’s going to hear about it at school anyway,” she says. “I want her to be careful [around police]. I don’t really think things have changed.”

Lora doesn’t fully agree. “It’s still a racist world,” she says. “But I also think often people of color use it as an excuse. We get depressed about the opportunities that we missed out on, instead of going for the opportunities that are there.” She and Candice are closer than they’ve ever been. “She’s really changed in the past year,” Lora says. “She calls me more. A lot more.”

Both daughters are thriving even as their father has struggled. Rodney never asked to be held up as a hero, and he’s failed spectacularly—and publicly—at it: Since the beating, he’s been arrested on charges including DUI, hit-and-run, indecent exposure and drug use, each one landing him back in the papers. He won a $3.8 million settlement in a civil suit against the city of Los Angeles after the beating—but subsequently lost most of it to legal fees and bad investments. In 2008 he appeared on VH1’s Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew; the sisters were on the show with him, and say the experience brought them all closer.

Although their father’s tabloid notoriety still haunts them, the two women are ready to write their own futures. Candice wants to stay clean and become a substance abuse counselor. Lora is working to start her own nonprofit for children with drug-addicted or incarcerated parents. “Having him as my dad pushed me to live the way I do,” she says. “I want to inspire people who have no hope.”

Gretchen Voss is an award-winning journalist based in the Boston area. Before Glamour went to press, Candice gave birth to a healthy girl, Mariah.